Steam to offer faster, smaller downloads with scheduling coming soon

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Valve has announced a major behind-the-scenes upgrade to the Steam digital gaming service. With it, we should all see our downloads happen faster and game updates and patches be smaller. On both fronts it’s good news for those on capped data plans or who were frustrated with just how slow Steam could be.

Although Valve hasn’t been very specific about what the upgrade entailed, the key changes include adding significantly more bandwidth to the whole Steam backend. What that should mean is, when a popular new game is released your Steam client doesn’t struggle to download it next to all the other competing gamers trying to do the same thing.

If you’ve had trouble getting Steam to work with your firewall and security suite in the past, you’ll be pleased to hear Valve has switched to a HTTP system for content which is “more firewall-friendly” than the Steam we have been using for the past few years.

As well as a lot more bandwidth, Valve has promised smaller downloads. This mainly relates to game updates where before, if a file had changed that a game already had an older version of, Steam needed to re-download the entire file. The new system only downloads the differences between the two versions of the file so the data transfer is much smaller.

For publishers, smaller downloads and more bandwidth means games get to gamers faster. But Valve has also redesigned the publishing tools that it claims will cut down the amount of time it takes to add a game to the service. The net effect of that is we as gamers should start seeing more games appear because the system and publishing process can cope with more.

Finally, we have a promise of key new features coming to Steam. Top of the bill is the ability to schedule your downloads and throttle how much bandwidth is used during those downloads. If you have multiple games to get on your hard drive, you’ll be able to priortize which gets pulled down first. Another first, and much desired feature, is the ability to download updates for a game while you play and then have them automatically applied when you exit the game.

Valve intends to roll out this new system slowly, and for the moment only HD videos seem to be using it. The first game to take advantage of the system is expected to be Dota 2.